Measuring Time: A Novel

How the White Man Came to Keti

Helon Habila set his first novel, Waiting for an Angel (2002), in the mid 1990s, in the Nigeria of Sani Abacha, the military dictator whose brutality led to his country's being suspended from the Commonwealth. The book's artful back-to front narrative begins when the journalist Lomba, imprisoned on charges of pro democracy activism, is discovered to have been writing in his cell. When the prison superintendent pays him a visit, we are prepared for the worst, not for what follows:

"Your papers...I read them....Prisoners sometimes smuggle out letters to the press to make us look foolish. Embarrass the government. But poems are harmless. Love poems....You wrote the poems for your girl, isn't it?"

Poets may be harmless, but they are hardly useless, and the smitten superintendent gets to the point: "I promised my lady a poem. She is educated, you know....You will write a poem for me. For my lady". So the political prisoner rhymes his way out of solitary confinement, and the consequent levity wrong-foots us ("With his third or fourth poem...Lomba began to send Janice cryptic messages"). The comedy does not just lighten Habila's prison-diary naturalism: the gentle, unexpected humour also deepens the episode's sombre conclusion, as Abacha further tightens national security, and Lomba is moved to another jail ("no record of him after that").

Such adept manipulation of narrative mood earned the opening chapter of Waiting for an Angel the 2001 Caine Prize for African Writing. Its skill was equalled in the novel's bold conclusion. Lomba's editor seeks a hasty way out of Nigeria after his office burns down. He asks Lomba to retrieve his passport from his house, hoping the young reporter will slip through the radar of Abacha's waiting thugs. But a gunman confronts Lomba, and the plan fails. The pair take refuge in the apartment of an eminent author, who is hosting a reading in honour of arrested poets. When Lomba and his editor arrive, all literary Lagos is there, eager for eyewitness reports of the arson attack. "Everything was burnt to ashes", Lomba informs his expectant audience.

"The bastards!"
"I'll write that into my new poem."
"I'll use it as the prologue to my new book. It is just the symbolism I've been searching for."

Habila pulls off a surprising shift, from tense thriller into something more unexpected, mocking the ambition to make literature from misery. Of course, that is exactly what Waiting for an Angel does. ("Hi, I am Helon Habila", one guest tells Lomba.) But while a sobering afterword underscored the obvious -- that, between 1993 and 1998 in Nigeria it was "a terrible time to be alive" -- Habila's novel emerged as an enviably defiant response to the Abacha years. Its verve did more than acknowledge iniquity.

For Habila, the decision to set his first novel in the modern, urban setting of 1990s Lagos was itself defiant. In an interview in 2004, he acknowledged his debt to his fellow Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri (the "pioneers"), but also expressed frustration with African authors who, nearly half a century after Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), still continued to write about "the traditional way people used to live and how it was destroyed by the white man, and all that".

While Waiting for an Angel sidelined these concerns by focusing on Nigeria's immediate past, Habila's new novel tackles them squarely in an attempt to complicate such cliched stories of cultural demolition. Measuring Time is set in 1963, three years after Independence, in the (fictional) northern village of Keti, where the twins Mamo and LaMamo are born. As teenagers in the 1970s, high on stories of the recent Civil War, the boys dream of glamorous army careers. But Mamo's sickle-cell anaemia means they must separate; while his brother becomes an itinerant soldier, joining rebel factions across the African continent, the studious Mamo remains in Keti, surviving his ill health to become a history teacher.

Hence the novel's major theme: Mamo's desire to revise a work of colonial-era ethnography, A Brief History of the Peoples of Keti, written in the early twentieth century by the Reverend Drinkwater, an American missionary. ("His first three pages are dedicated to comparing our geography to that of his native Iowa, and he seems to blame us for having only two seasons instead of four, and for not having snowfall, can you believe that? And here a whole chapter is wasted on trying to expose the fraudulence of our traditional healers...".) Mamo's own proposed history -- which has the postcolonially pluralist title Lives and Times -- won't describe "the weather and the landscape and the constitution", but rather the "ordinary people who toil and dream and suffer, who bear the brunt of whatever vicissitude time inflicts".

Most of Measuring Time charts the steps Mamo takes towards realizing that ambition, digressing now and then to quote one of his brother's sparse letters from the front in Chad, Libya and Mali. By 1990, LaMamo is fighting in Liberia, and it is only here that Habila lets us into the soldier's world, allowing him to tell his brother (in curiously novelistic fashion) how he murdered the sadistic leader of his mercenary pack. LaMamo's epistle matches Waiting for an Angel in its capacity for surprise; only halfway through fifteen pages does he casually let slip the news, "I shot the major". But the letter also exposes some weak characterization. LaMamo's action has saved a hostage from being raped, and his dispatch home reports the woman's thanks:

"You are different, I have been watching you...you don't enjoy killing like the others. Why would somebody enjoy killing other people and destroying their whole lives?"

Of course LaMamo is different: he is a good guy, and Habila won't have us think otherwise. The novel draws a veil over what the soldier did before he became a hero and there is too little of the moral ambiguity that enjoys free rein in Waiting for an Angel where prison superintendents are not simply callous brutes, and authors are not simply sensitive souls. (The one-dimensional portrait of LaMamo contrasts with the way Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie handles similar material in her Civil War novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, 2006); she does not flinch from having one of her key characters -- who has our sympathy from the start -- participate in the atrocities once the fight for Biafran Independence begins.) Here, while the rather too easily redeemed LaMamo puts down his rifle and goes to work for Medecins sans Frontieres, Mamo starts teaching history at the village school.

The weight of the novel's ideas begins to tell when he gets his first class under way by scribbling a question on the blackboard: "What is history?". The "infinitesimally tiny chalk particles floated on the air in slow motion, taking a whole eternity to settle on his hands and face, to waft into his nostrils", and so the question literally enters his body. It doesn't worry him, however, until he finds a copy of Drinkwater's Brief History while pottering about one day at his lover Zara's house. Mamo asks if she has read it: "No, why should I? History is not one of my interests", she replies. "Then I am sure you didn't know that no one has ever written our history before", he says. Seeing how Drinkwater's subject excites Mamo (while she prepares the dinner, he is busy "underlining whole paragraphs and making extensive marginalia"), Zara advises him to "write about our history, about misrepresentations by foreign historians, using this book as your example". Mamo looks thoughtful. "You mean a sort of revisionist essay?" This is all alarmingly crude. On one page, Zara (a schoolteacher) says that history is of little consequence to her; on the next, she is giving Mamo tips on how to get published in academic journals. This confirms the suspicion that Zara is no more than a bit of love interest to push Mamo's story along a little; a suspicion that increases the moment we read how she "loved to lounge naked around the house...sometimes she'd cook a whole meal dressed only in panties, her full breasts swinging whenever she turned or bent down to open a drawer".

As this kind of thing shows, Measuring Time is altogether perkier than Waiting for an Angel, where Habila's vocabulary is shot through with terror of Abacha's death squads (even the Lagos heat goes "tearing into doors and windows, advancing from room to room, systematically seeking out and strangling to death the last traces of cool air"). Yet in spite of this it lacks the earlier novel's bracing wit. Only rare flashes remain, seen when a British journal rejects Mamo's "revisionist essay" about Drinkwater: "if you have other pieces that address such issues as the AIDS scourge, or genital circumcision, or other typical African experiences in a challenging and progressive way, we'd like to take a look at them". Habila's sharp take on the Western demand for only the very worst of "typical African experiences" reminds us of the larger point on which his fiction has so far insisted: the often-overlooked likelihood that there are more benign, and hence more intriguing, stories which deserve an equal hearing. That is why Waiting for an Angel did not dwell on the horror of the Abacha years; and it is why the new novel puts such emphasis on Mamo's ostensibly unpromising interest in Drinkwater -- in order to show how the white man's impact on Keti can end up meaning more to the villagers than mere cultural loss or defeat.

Measuring Time is uneven, but it is still compelling to see how Helon Habila awakens consciousness of this possibility in his would-be revisionist historian. The final chapter has Mamo attend Keti's traditional Christmas play, an eagerly anticipated entertainment based on Drinkwater's arrival in 1918. The climax depicts the missionary trashing the village idols until, "eyes blazing", he turns to the audience and triumphantly declaims Joshua 24:15 -- "Choose for yourself this day whom you will serve...but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord". Mamo marvels at the villagers' joy in revisiting yet again this zealous desecration of their heritage. But then he considers: "there was more satire than celebration, as if they were saying to Drinkwater: We know something you didn't know".

Anthony Cummins is writing a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford on Émile Zola in late nineteenth-century England.

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